Steve Almond

Steve Almond, Story collections: God Bless America, The Evil B.B. Chow. Co-author of novel, Which Brings Me to You. Nonfiction: Letters from People Who Hate Me, Not That You Asked, My Life in Heavy Metal, Candyfreak.

photo credit: Stephen Ducati

From an interview by Aaron Gilbreath

You still get rejected, as you mentioned earlier. What's your ratio right now, your miss-to-hit?

Probably five-to-one, something like that.

That's pretty damn good.

It's pretty damn good. It used to be like thirty-to-one. It used to be forty-to-one. I mean, I'm thinking of a story that I sent out for seven or eight years called "The Darkness Together." I knew it was a good story, and I sent it to forty places, and finally, finally, finally, I think it was the second time I sent it to, I think it was the Southern Review, they finally took it. And it won a Pushcart, and I thought, "I have a list of forty magazines that had said no to it," some of them very small magazines. And it's not like I rewrote the thing. I knew it was a solid story. So what do you do with that? You just have to develop calluses. You just have to go, "Okay, fine, I'm going to ignore that rejection," because those are the odds.